Archive for August, 2021

4 results.

SCGO Serenity Observatory Renovation 2021-Part2 – Deck

Aug25
by catz on August 25, 2021 at 20:26 and modified on August 25, 2021. at 20:30
Posted In: life the universe and everything


The plan was to build a raised deck, high enough up for very good ventilation and high enough not to be shelter for critters.
Crushed gravel went in first, followed by a 1″ 12″x12″ patio stone followed by two stacked deck blocks. A small 2×2 was installed in the deck blocks to keep them aligned and together.
The pier was backfilled with dirt. The deck was built from 2x6x10′, 16″ on center except at the end where the pier was.


Blocks were added between the joists for more stability.

The deck supports were cantilevered in a touch so as to distribute the load better, and to help avoid stubbings ones feet at the end of the deck.
We also then added a layer of cloth to prevent critters from coming up between the decking, which was spaced to allow for air to come in and rain to go down and through.


5/4×6 PT decking was added and many measurements were taken to move onto the next steps.

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SCGO Serenity Observatory Renovation 2021-Part1 – Pier

Aug25
by catz on August 25, 2021 at 20:17 and modified on August 25, 2021. at 20:19
Posted In: life the universe and everything


We had have piers made from 2×6 wood in a box format, anchored in concrete and filled with sand. They rotted in about 10 years and were never really stable! So this time we were going for fullon concrete. Since our soils is about 3-5″ of peat then into solid fractured rock, we opted to get a bigfoot concrete form and then a sonotube to extend it upward to the height we wanted.
Height was a very difficult thing to calculate as there were many variables with nknown error bars: an uncertain depth of hole, our sonotube was 8.5″ and would fit inside the bigfoot after it was filled and it was uncertain if the sonotube could go all the way down. The deck would be raise quite a ways up off the rock but it also had crushedgravel, a patio stone and then two stacked deck blocks. So we tried to design with a lot of give/slack/room for errors.


So the BF28 bigfoot went into the ground. It was weighed down with deck blocks to make sure it did not float away.
7 bags of concrete (just add water) 30kg each were mixed one at a time in this tray.
It was tiring work and about 1 hour of time. We had prepared three threaded rods with a wooden adapter and nuts and bolts to and placed them inside the concrete and placed a 2×4 across the top to hold it in place.

This was the end result of the pier (ignore the deck.. that is decsribed in the next part).

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SCGO Serenity Observatory Renovation 2021

Aug25
by catz on August 25, 2021 at 19:59 and modified on August 25, 2021. at 20:05
Posted In: astronomy


This is the original Serenity Observatory at SCGO circa 2020 January. It is located out in the back lowlands which often are quite wet. We have been adding an earth berm over time to be able to walk out there without getting sopping wet feet. It was a stationary building with a flipopen roof.
All of the walls and roof were made with 5/8″ OSB and it did not weather well in the wet with only paint protection. So, plastic was added to the roof and building wrap to the walls and doors.


This is the 102mm Meade Schmidt Cass telescope that was inside the observatory on a Meade LXD55 mount. The observatory was designed with remote imaging in mind, not visual. Having said that, I would have to get inside the 4’x4′ box to fix, align, adjust, etc.

Then, after 20 years of looking and saving, a new telescope and mount came my way.
The Skywatcher AZ-EQ6GT mount and the Vixen VC200L 200mm f9 scope were immediately installed and .. they were too big! There was even less room than before to get inside to adjust and fiddle.

So the decision was made to build a new observatory for the new equipment. We wanted to build a huge observatory for two.. say 8’x14′ or so, but then the price of lumber quadrupled! So that was outside of the budget. In addition we wanted to go with a pier and a “miniobservatory design”. We’ve had a microobservatory before, which was just a small box on a pier over the scope.
Here with the mini observatory we wanted to reuse the existing 4×4 structure in a roll off building and allow it to be used as a warm control room. Once everything is setup, then it can be used remotely.

This is the end result:

The next few articles will cover the detailed steps on how we built this and why we made the design choices we did.

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Saturn 2021 July 30

Aug01
by catz on August 1, 2021 at 11:59 and modified on August 1, 2021. at 11:59
Posted In: astronomy

This is one of a few imaging runs of Saturn taken Friday evening. The new mount is still not polar aligned, so there was more drift than I was happy with. This is the first time the x2 antares barlow was used. Focus is still quite soft (I still do not have a full length extension on the electric focus controller) and that will get better.

Again, the camera would not come to focus with the x2 barlow, but it did with the 90 deg diagonal. So I am still all confused up as to orientation, flipx flipy choices. I had to go into stellarium to see what Saturn should look like and edit it after the fact.

This was a 240 second run with 60ms exposures. The best 25% of 3970 frames were used. I love the scale of 3600mm focal length… Saturn is actually larger than a pinprick!

So, altitude was still very low and Saturn was still in the Kingston SkyDome… so this again is a benchmark image, where future ones can only get better 🙂

Also attached is an image from Allsky1pi (with its new wider angle lens) camera system actually showing Saturn at the same time as the telescopic image was taken, approx 22:53 EDT Friday evening. Saturn is 19deg altitude and is located centrally in the Kingston SkyDome. If I had better prepared with a nap, I could have gotten up around 02:00 or 03:00 when it would have cleared the light pollution.

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